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Staring at the Light is one of the Frances Fyfield Helen West novels, with the CPS prosecutor working a case that initially looks like a simple inheritance dispute and unspools into something darker involving a dental practice and the kind of slow accumulating professional malfeasance that the form documents better than most.
Fyfield's strength is the moral pressure on her professional protagonists. Helen and Detective Bailey continue their long-running on-and-off relationship in this entry, and Fyfield handles the personal material with the same restraint she brings to the case material. The dental-practice setting is rendered with the kind of careful institutional attention that distinguishes her work.
Four stars. Recommended to readers of British legal procedural with serious institutional interest. The Helen West sequence remains underread.
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